HHS awards last contracts for digital health records

The Health and Human Services Department on Thursday awarded its final set of contracts to create the infrastructure for a national system of electronic health records.

Four contracts totaling $18.6 million were awarded to four groups comprised of technology developers, management consulting firms and defense contracting companies.

"The Nationwide Health Information Network contracts will bring together technology developers with doctors and hospitals to create innovative, state-of-the-art ideas for how health information can be securely shared," HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt said in a statement.

Accenture, Computer Sciences Corp., IBM and Northrop Grumman will lead the groups. Each company will partner with tech companies and healthcare providers to develop an infrastructure within a year that meets government standards and regulations.

Each prototype network should be able to securely share information among hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies and physicians in three participating markets. Information also must be able to flow securely among the four separate architectures, David Brailer, the national coordinator for health information technology, said in a conference call.

The prototypes will test patient identification and information locator services, user authentication systems, and access control to test the feasibility of a large-scale system. The final architecture will be free for public use in order to spur innovation.

The American Health Information Community will offer the contractors direction. AHIC, whose members were appointed by Leavitt, is comprised of private and public players. The group will identify "breakthrough cases," or priority areas for the contractors to implement in their planning.

Five areas have been identified: chronic disease management, quality measurements, biological surveillance, e-prescriptions and a consumer drug-list portal. "We would hope that with these contractors, these breakthroughs might see the light of day," Brailer said.

The consortia also will work with health insurance companies to define a business model and to understand what role they might play, said Scott Myers of Accenture.

The goal is to create a system providing "cheap, easy connectivity for doctors" at a low cost for consumers while allowing public health officials to extract anonymous, aggregated data in case of a national disaster or biological attack, Brailer said.

The announcement of these contracts comes 18 months after President Bush called for a nationwide system of interoperable e-health records by 2014. This "marks a real turning point in the United States," Brailer said Wednesday at the World Health Innovation and Technology Congress in Washington.

This is the fourth set of major HHS technology contracts to be awarded this year. The department previously awarded contracts to develop a process to certify health IT products, find solutions to address conflicting state and federal regulations and privacy practices, and create a system to harmonize information standards.

Other technology companies that are working on similar issues within a consortium include Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and WebMD.